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A glossary for MT–terrific! MT on a glossary—horrific!

November 3, 2012 by Barbara Inge Karsch

In the last few months, I have been reading quite a bit about machine translation. And I also took the opportunity at the recent LocWorld in Seattle and the ATA conference in San Diego to attend sessions on MT.

In Seattle, TAUS presented several real-world examples of what can today be done with the Moses engine. It was refreshing to hear from experts on statistical MT that terminology matters, since that camp, at least at MS, had largely been ignorant to terminology management in the past. Here are a number of worthwhile tutorials on the TAUS site for those who’d like to stay abreast of developments.

At the ATA, the usual suspects, Laurie Gerber, Rubén de la Fuente, and Mike Dillinger, outdid each other once again in debunking the myth around MT. When fears did come up in the audience about MT and its effects, I had to think of a little story:

In the mid-90s, five of us German translators at J.D. Edwards were huddled in a conference room for some training. Something or someone was terribly delayed, and while chatting we all started catching up on the translation quota due that day. You know what that involved? It involved finding a string that came up 500 to 800 times. After translating it once, you could continue your chat and hit enter 500 to 800 times. See the screen print of the translation software to the right and you will realize that the software didn’t allow a human to translate like a human; we translated like machines, only worse because…oops, the 800 strings are through and you are on to the next source string. Some would call this negligent behavior and I am glad that today we have better translation software and that machines assist with or do the jobs that we are not good at.

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ATA impressions

November 22, 2011 by Barbara Inge Karsch

I have traveled quite a bit during the last four weeks and it is high time for an update. Let me start with a review of yet another great conference of the American Translators Association in Boston.

At last year’s ATA conference in Denver, I was still stunned because the Association still seemed to catch up with technology and the opportunity to embrace machine translation. This year, I saw something completely differently. Mike Dillinger gave a well attended, entertaining and educational seminar on machine translation. He certainly lived up to his promise of showing “what the translator’s role is in this new business model.”

It was so clear that editing for MT is a market segment on the rise, if not during Mike’s seminar, then during Laurie Gerber’s presentation on the specifics of editing machine translation output. She also shared tips on how to educate “over-optimistic clients”. You add to that Jost Zetzsche’s presentation on dealing with that flood of data, and the puzzle pieces start forming a picture of new skills and new jobs.

Jost’s presentation is very much in line with an article by Detlef Reineke and Christian Galinski in eDITion, the publication of the German Terminology Association, DTT, about the flood of terminology in our future (“Vor uns die Terminologieflut”). To stem the flood, it helps to think of “data,” as Jost did, rather than texts, documents or even segments. He also declared the glossary outdated and announced a bright future for terminology databases. To think about texts, documents, segments, concepts and terms as data is helpful in the sense that data along with solid corresponding metadata have a higher reuse value, if you will, than unmanaged translation memories or the final translation product. That has been terminologists’ message for a long time.

I also attended sessions on translation education, one by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and one by New York University. Since I will be working with the Translation Center of the University of Illinois on a small research project and am currently preparing the online terminology course that will be part of the M.S. at NYU starting this spring, it was nice to meet my colleagues in person.

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Terminology and Knowledge Engineering Conference 2012

November 16, 2011 by Barbara Inge Karsch

There are not too many conferences that carry terminology in their title and that offer continuing education and fruitful exchanges to terminologists. The TKE conference is one of them. Here is the announcement of the TKE Conference 2012.

New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

TKE (Terminology and Knowledge Engineering) Conference

In 2012, the conference will take place in Madrid, Spain, from June 19 through 22. This conference will mainly focus on those theoretical, methodological and practical aspects that show the symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering by highlighting the recent advances in these related fields.

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From the Blog

  • A glossary for MT–terrific! MT on a glossary—horrific!
  • Part-time position for an Arabic terminologist
  • Tidbit from the ATA Conference
  • Bilingual corpora and target terminology research
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